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Building Production-Grade, Resilient Architectures with Amazon EKS
Platform Engineering on EKS
- Platforms are built by platform engineers to provide cloud infrastructure as a service for application teams.
- Platform teams are organized by teams, applications, and infrastructure.
- There is a growing trend in the adoption of EKS, with 33% year-over-year growth in the number of clusters being managed.
Cluster Lifecycle Management
- Unmanaged growth of EKS clusters can lead to challenges:
- Difficulty in enforcing standards across the fleet of clusters
- Automation challenges
- Lack of a single source of truth
- Addon management
- Workload matching and cost optimization
Cluster Management Patterns
- Platform teams are shifting from providing templates as a service to offering more managed services:
- Cluster-as-a-Service
- Namespace-as-a-Service
- Application Deployment-as-a-Service
GitOps-Driven Cluster Management
- Using GitOps for cluster management provides benefits like reduced complexity, enhanced visibility, and increased security.
- The cluster's bill of materials includes the control plane, worker nodes, and addons, all of which can be managed through GitOps.
- Argo CD can be used as the GitOps agent to reconcile the desired state with the actual state of the cluster.
Cluster Resiliency and Upgrades
- Upgrading clusters in batches requires safeguards to ensure resiliency and availability.
- The EKS team uses a "cell" approach to upgrade clusters, where a "cell" represents a unit of work (e.g., a single cluster) that is upgraded in waves.
- The time between waves (the "bake" or "soak" time) decreases as the number of cells increases, and different levels of testing are performed between waves.
- This pattern can be applied to your own EKS clusters, with the GitOps-driven process used to orchestrate the rollout.
Observability
Roles and Responsibilities
- Platform teams are responsible for keeping clusters up and running, providing a reliable service to application teams.
- Observability strategies should include proactive alerting, runbooks, and feedback loops to enable the continuous delivery process.
Observability Challenges
- Determining what to monitor and set alert thresholds for can be challenging, as the number of components and workloads in a cluster can be extensive.
- Maintaining an aggregate view of all clusters, across accounts and regions, is important for managing the fleet at scale.
Cluster Inventory Management
- Developer portals like Backstage can be used to provide a centralized view of all EKS clusters, including metadata, relationships, and deep links to other systems.
Governance
Ensuring Consistency at Scale
- Policies as code engines like OPA, Gatekeeper, and Kube-bench can be used to enforce consistency and guardrails across the cluster fleet.
Policy Management Challenges
- Keeping cluster upgrades on track by preventing deployments of deprecated APIs or resources that can block the rollout.
- Ensuring application availability by enforcing things like pod disruption budgets.
Policy Management Patterns
- Using a single Helm chart to deploy all policies, with the ability to enable/disable specific policies for different clusters or environments.
- Handling exceptions by leveraging policy engine features like OPA's exceptions.
- Aggregating policy violations using tools like Kube-bench's Policy Reporter, integrating with security services like AWS Security Hub.
Additional Resources
- EKS Workshop Hands-On Labs
- EKS Best Practices Guide
- EKS-related sessions at re:Invent 2023
- GitHub repository with links to related resources